The Morikami Museum and Agriculture

http://www.morikami.org/index.php?submenu=OurHistory&src=gendocs&ref=OurHistory&category=Visit

A friend recently alerted me to the fact that the Morikami Museum and gardens are really the remains of a Japanese farmer colony from the early part of the 20th century.

http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2010/9/7/florida-to-amanohashidate/

Here is what wikipedia has to say about the colony.

"The Model Land Company was created by Henry Flagler to hold title to the land granted to his Florida East Coast Railway by the State of Florida. The company encouraged the settlement of its land, particularly by recent immigants, to gain money from the sale of the land and to increase business for the railroad. In 1903, the company was referred to Jo Sakai, a Japanese man who had just graduated from New York University. Sakai purchased 1,000 acres (4 km²) from the Model Land Company, and recruited young men from his hometown of Miyazu, Japan, to settle there. Several hundred settlers grew pineapples, which were shipped from the Yamato station on the Florida East Coast Railway. Pineapple blight destroyed the crop in 1908. In addition, the colony could no longer compete with cheaper (and earlier maturing) pineapples from Cuba. As a result, many of the settlers returned to Japan or moved elsewhere in the United States. The remnants of the colony were dispossessed after the entry of the United States into World War II, when their land was taken to create an Army Air Corps training base (now the site of Florida Atlantic University and the Boca Raton Airport). The only member of the Yamato Colony to stay in the area was George Morikami, who continued to farm in neighboring Delray Beach, Florida until the 1970s, when he donated his farmland to Palm Beach County to preserve it as a park, and to honor the memory of the Yamato Colony."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamato_Colony,_Florida

Here is Sakai-san.

http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2010/9/21/florida-to-amanohashidate/

Yoko Ono and the Miracle Apple

I read a book called "The Miracle Apple" in Japanese last year and posted about it a little as well.

I was intrigued to find that Yoko Ono had noticed the book and decided to translate it on her website

http://imaginepeace.com/miracleapples/?page_id=8

This is what she has to say:

Dear Friends

It is my greatest pleasure to present this book MIRACLE APPLES to you for your consideration.

Let me explain how I came across this book, and what the book is about.

I was sitting in the lounge of JAL in Tokyo waiting to go back to New York. I picked up this book from the newly published books displayed in the corner. Once I started to read the book, I could not put it down. The attendant of the waiting room told me I could take the book with me, so I read the whole book on the plane to New York, and immediately wished there was a second book on this subject.

This book is a revolution. It is a true story of how an apple farmer worked for 10 years to find a way to grow apples without using any insecticide. I assume the method he has discovered does not just apply to growing apples, but any plants raised with insecticide.

As he worked year after year, people of the village and his friends all started to think he had gone crazy. At first, the apple orchard he inherited from his ancestors was destroyed by his not using any insecticide. Clouds of insects came to his orchard from other orchards which used insecticide. His two sons quit school to avoid being teased by their classmates. He lost all his savings, and had to be a bouncer in a local bar for a while. His wife did not say anything, but every day she delivered her handmade lunch in a beautiful lunchbox to the field where he was sitting by himself, unshaved, not doing anything anymore but watching the sky.

After ten years of this, he finally thought he had been wrong in starting this incredible journey. One full moon night, he went up a hill to commit suicide. He sat on a stone, and wondered how he could do it.

Then suddenly a distant tree caught his eye; the tree was shining in the moonlight. It was an apple tree!

“Why would a single apple tree be here on this hill?” he thought.

He ran to the tree and found out that it was not an apple tree, but the tree gave him inspiration. “That’s right! The apple trees in the orchards are all raised at first in a green house and then replanted; the natural roots were cut off. You need the natural roots to raise a strong and healthy tree.” So he got apple trees with natural roots, and sprayed little amounts of vinegar instead of insecticide. The strange thing was that the insects did not come around the apple trees in his orchard anymore.

After this discovery, he was interviewed on TV. A documentary of his story was made, and he became famous. Every day he gets many emails from people wanting to buy his apples. He refuses to mass-produce them, so the apples are sold very slowly to people who line up for them.

The Miracle Apples also do not deteriorate, since there is nothing bad in them. I think that’s how our bodies could be if we didn’t have any poison in them.

If his method is used to raise fruits and vegetables, it will save our children, our grand children, and us, from getting unnecessary illness.

That’s why I call this book a revolution. I hope you will feel the same.

Sincerely,

yoko

Yoko Ono
July 2010
New York City

Confrontation Over Fukushima Radiation

This was a poignant moment: the chairman of JA Central in the lobby of Tokyo Power delivering a formal document protesting the contamination of crops in Northeastern Japan and the contamination of crops which have resulted from the radiation incident from Tokyo Power. "We have suffered terrible damage from the Daiichi reactor in Fukushima. Nonetheless, there has been no explanation, no apologies forthcoming up to now. I deliver this formal protest from the bottom of my heart."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY4UNnQMjpM

TPP, Nokyo, and the Earthquake

It appears that about 24,000 hectares of fields used for crops have been washed away, flooded, or severely damaged during the 3/11 earthquake. In Fukushima, as a result of damage to water channels and radiation concerns,. 14,000 hectares cannot be planted this year.

http://www.asahi.com/national/update/0323/TKY201103230474.html

The TPP negotiation process of course has been put on hold. But this disaster is going to make many Japanese rethink the value of Nokyo given the important role the organization is playing in surveying damage and speaking on behalf of farmers to the government.

For example, the JA has formed a focus group which is considering ways to reduce damage to the reputation of agricultural products coming from northeast Japan, ways to seek compensation from the government, and even ways to pressure Tokyo Power to accept some of the damage done to agriculture through radiation.

JA is trying a soft approach which does not involve legal battles. "Damage" is defined in three ways by the group. 1) Products which have been directly prevented from being shipped by radiation, 2) Cases where business has been prevented by customer concerns, falling prices, or voluntary restraint, and 3) damage to reputation. The latter is still under consideration as the group is just in the process of understanding just how the disaster has affected production and making clear what the producer position actually is.

Nokyo

This is actually kind of an anniversary post, as my first entry was on March 28, 2009. This post is about Nokyo, the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives, and this is an appropriate topic.

When I first started my blog, it wandered around a bit before coming to settle in a general way on the online version of the Nokyo Shimbun, the newspaper of the Japan agricultural cooperatives. So while I did not exactly hit every topic of the week in Japanese agriculture, I ended up talking about the issues which were important to Nokyo.

One of the interesting things about Nokyo for me has been to see the deeply negative attitude that western scholars and business community has for Nokyo. Japanese business groups such as Keidanren view Nokyo as the enemy as well.

So it is a little fitting that I stumbled upon a 1981 paper from Pacific Affairs written by an Australian academic called "The Japanese Farm Lobby and Agricultural Policy-Making".

The paper is valuable because it spells some of the basic features of Nokyo in a readily understandable way. In my next one or two posts, I am going to write some of the things Professor George has written, because most of her observations are equally relevant today.

But to me the harsh criticisms by western academics toward Nokyo are a little hard to understand. Here is an example from the paper on page 411.

"Nokyo's unchallenged monopoly of economic activities in the farm sector is matched by its grasp on politics and policy-making for agriculture. It occupies a unique position vis a vis the government, acting as its agent for the administration of a whole range of policies. Agricultural laws integrate Nokyo directly into the functioning of the agriculture and forestry administration. They include the Agricultural Basic Law, the Food Control Law, the Law Relating to Price Stabilization for Livestock Products, and the Feed Demand and Supply Stabilization Law. The government also uses Nokyo as a channel for payments to producers, including subsidies, and other forms of financial assistance. As part of this ancillary role, Nokyo enjoys special budgetary privileges, automatic consultation in policy-making and a close alliance with the governing conservative LDP."

The basic recurring theme in the west is that Nokyo has way more influence and control over policy-making than a backwards, anti- big business, cooperative should have.

While I try to avoid talking about politics in my blog, I am basically sympathetic with the value system that Nokyo represents whether on not the organization is an exemplary business model or not. I understand its desire to maintain rural Japan at any cost and to keep Japan's self-sufficiency rate to be threatened by excessive food imports. I understand the symbolic importance of rice agriculture, for example, which goes far beyond its profitability as a sector.